By James R. Dunworth September 24, 2017
It should be fairly obvious that picking scabs seldom promotes the healing of wounds. What percentage of the U.S. population thought race relations were good in 2008? What percentage thought they were good in 2016? For the eight years of the Obama Administration, race was a constant topic of discussion. Did it improve race relations or worsen them?
In 2008, very few people were claiming the police were racist, and no one was shooting policemen (black and white) because of it. In 2008, no one was rioting over monuments to Confederate soldiers, or suggesting that the "Star-Spangled Banner" should not be sung, or that the Jefferson Memorial should be torn down because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.........Everyone reading this who is descended from a slave, please raise your hand.
If you are white, and you did not put your hand up, think again, and put it up. From shortly after Adam and Eve got their eviction notice until the mid-19th century, slavery was the normal condition of the bulk of mankind. Surely, there is no one on this earth who does not have slaves in his family tree, including the crowned heads of Europe. Slavery is considered a racial issue today only because its last gasp in the Western world involved enslaved Africans..........One last comment on race. There were black slave owners in the South. If a free black had a farm too big to work with his family, he would purchase a slave. Slavery was not strictly a black/white matter. The Jim Crow laws were. Those laws were the result of hardening political attitudes during Reconstruction. We don’t need to be doing anything to harden those attitudes again.................Read more
It should be fairly obvious that picking scabs seldom promotes the healing of wounds. What percentage of the U.S. population thought race relations were good in 2008? What percentage thought they were good in 2016? For the eight years of the Obama Administration, race was a constant topic of discussion. Did it improve race relations or worsen them?
In 2008, very few people were claiming the police were racist, and no one was shooting policemen (black and white) because of it. In 2008, no one was rioting over monuments to Confederate soldiers, or suggesting that the "Star-Spangled Banner" should not be sung, or that the Jefferson Memorial should be torn down because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.........Everyone reading this who is descended from a slave, please raise your hand.
If you are white, and you did not put your hand up, think again, and put it up. From shortly after Adam and Eve got their eviction notice until the mid-19th century, slavery was the normal condition of the bulk of mankind. Surely, there is no one on this earth who does not have slaves in his family tree, including the crowned heads of Europe. Slavery is considered a racial issue today only because its last gasp in the Western world involved enslaved Africans..........One last comment on race. There were black slave owners in the South. If a free black had a farm too big to work with his family, he would purchase a slave. Slavery was not strictly a black/white matter. The Jim Crow laws were. Those laws were the result of hardening political attitudes during Reconstruction. We don’t need to be doing anything to harden those attitudes again.................Read more
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